The Scamp (35 page)

She touches my wrist. You're my sister, she says. Before she goes, she kisses me soft, on the mouth. Don't forget that, she says. Forget everything else.

I watch her for as long as I can see her. Across the tracks, into the field. White, naked.

I think for a moment about following. About lifting the dress from my own body, stepping off the platform into the dark, naked, clamoring along behind.

I catch one last glimpse of her white hair in the weeds. Head low, hackles up, rangy and hungry. Looking for the kill.

There's nothing for me to do but run into the street. My own lost soul, like Virginia's, but unharmed, stepping into traffic while the fire trucks and cops come barreling down toward the old train station. By then, the building is consumed. Fire shoots out the roof, it licks out the windows, the street is filled with black chemical smoke.

I sit in the back of an ambulance while
EMT
s check me over. There's not a scratch on me. Just a fuzz in my ears.

At the precinct, I sit at a desk while a woman cop asks me what I know.

How can I tell her what I know?

Where is Couper? I ask her.

He's with Detective Banks, she says. He'll be here shortly.

She asks me again to recount the order of events. The teenage girl. The shooting. The flammable liquid in the vases.

And the woman? she says. Is your relative. Is Kathleen Reed.

No, I say. I don't know who that was.

They send search parties, dogs, in the direction she ran off. In the days after the fire is out, they clear the remains of a teenage girl and, from the basement, an adult male.

I give a statement. I sign a release. I am given a full medical and mental examination. I spend a night in the small Delta hospital, quiet and blue inside, with just the padded soles of nurses, one doctor and then another, who examine me gently, with their hands, their words. And then I am free to go.

I don't see Couper until I come out of the public safety building. By the sidewalk, the Gran Torino and the Scamp, hitched and ready. It's dawn again, another day. The sun, hot behind the tail of the Scamp.

I don't ask him if he's waiting for me, or if he has to go back in for more questioning.

Did they find her? I ask.

No, he says. Not yet.

Give me the keys, I say.

My mother took me to the doctor after the cherry bomb. They tested my hearing, put large, tan, padded headphones on me and had me drop tongue depressors into
a basket every time I heard a beep. I missed the highest and lowest tones, even after it was better, a few days later. But the damage, they said, was minimal.

We also went to a woman doctor I had never seen before, not my regular family doctor. She spoke to me in a quiet voice, in the room by myself, without my mother even. She rubbed my shoulders through the soft, thin hospital gown and asked me if I ever wet the bed. I said no, but she said she needed to check me down there, to make sure everything was intact.
Intact
, she said, like I'd been broken inside by the bomb, but all I remember of it was the look of the leaves on the trees, upside down, their silver underbellies turned up like a storm was coming, and the sound, rattling my teeth.

I remember her hands, in soft gloves, like nothing had ever gone before them.

She told my mother I was okay.

Then we went to a dermatologist who gave her a cream to rub around my mouth where my lips had broken out in a rough, pink rash.

He told my mother I was going to be okay.

My mother cut my hair herself, and then took me to a salon called Cut N Curl to have them do the rest. The hair, all around me on the kitchen floor, long ratted curls. She sealed them up in a Ziploc baggie before she put them in the trash. The beautician at Cut N Curl called me Bunny and cranked my chair up real high and cut as close as she could to my head without using a buzzer. When she washed my hair, leaning over me while my head dipped
backward into the sink, I noticed she had soft, sparse black hairs under her arms. That she smelled like something warm and almost stinky, a kind of oil, or wax.

She told me I was a darling. And I looked at my new face in the mirror, my mouth covered in rash, my hair so short everything showed, all my freckles, my ears that stuck out, the nubs of my adult teeth, coming in large and crowded between two tiny baby teeth on either side. I had never seen anything so ugly.

I hated it.

I drive to a motel. I get blindly on the highway, ignoring the tractor trailers and the minivans and station wagons, and gun it. This car has power. I blow past them in the left lane, with Couper, slumped in the passenger seat, digging in the glove box for his inhaler. I don't think about what the speed does to the Scamp, or whether we will come unhinged.

My ears are still stuffed with constant buzzing. In my head, any time I close my eyes, the window, sprayed, the floor, moving with blood. Tennessee's empty doll body, crumpled. The smell of chemical burning in my nose, like it's been singed.

I pull off at a Days Inn where there's a Roy Rogers and an Arco on the opposite corners. There's no town. There's a sign for a town farther in.

Can you pay for this? I say to Couper. If I don't stop driving, I'll vibrate my way into a full scream. If I start screaming, I'm afraid I won't stop. The landscape
around us, unreal, weirdly shaped and colored. The trees, like blue cotton balls. I don't know where we are.

He looks like I've taken a shot at him. I think I can handle a fifty-nine-dollar room, he says. But outside the car, he leans over, his hands on his knees, his body bent in half. Oh, Jesus, he says.

Inside, the guy at the front desk greets Couper by laying his hands—fat and dimpled like a little boy's—on the counter. Checking out? he says.

Checking in, Couper says.

I stand with my back to the high counter, looking at brochures for caverns and outlet malls. A pizza joint where a woman with a big blond beehive plays show tunes on a pipe organ that comes up out of the floor on a revolving platform. I can't believe anything at all goes on around here that's not a quilting bee or a tent revival.

Check-in's at three, the guy says. He has a thick drawl, drippy and slow.

You don't have anything? Couper says. I need something now.

The clerk hems, and shuffles, and when I turn, I see how heavy he is. His moving is slow and labored. He slides cards in and out of the pigeonholes in the counter. I'd have to charge you all twice, he says. Last night and tonight, too.

That's fine, Couper says.

Just you and your wife, sir? he says. He starts typing.

She's not my wife, Couper says, and I hear myself go
Huh
, hard, and not laughing. The sound, echoing in my stuffed head.

The clerk holds out a pen and registration card for Couper, but pauses right there, the pen on a ball chain connected to the counter. His still face is fat, but younger than its weight.

Couper sweats at the hairline, pale, like he might lean over to vomit.

I don't want any trouble, the clerk says.

I'm not giving you trouble, Couper says. He opens his wallet. I'm giving you cash.

Oh, he says, hesitant. You can't. You can't pay cash, sir.

There's music from above, old seventies country like we'd hear at our grandmother's house. The adults, as many as there were alive at that point, around the kitchen table. Me and Khaki and Nudie on the living room floor with old board games, Parcheesi and Sorry.

You won't accept my cash, Couper says.

Sir, I need to register the room with a credit card, and I need to run the card . . . for incidentals. The word comes out whispery and he wrinkles his nose when he says it. He looks past Couper at me, with my hair wild, my face glazed. I feel like I've been up for days. He won't look me in the eye, even though I stare right at him.

Couper lays out cash on the counter. Five new hundred-dollar bills.

Look, Couper says. I'm going to give you this money, and you're going to let me have a room just for tonight, and then we'll leave, okay?

I need your license.

I don't have my license, Couper says.

Sir, I can see your license right there, he says.

I watch Couper scoop up the five hundred-dollar bills like a dealer picking up cards.

Let's go, he says to me.

He drives down the country route instead, past a tiny town of just a Gulf station, a Baptist church, and a barbecue pit, with no stoplight even. A small wrought-iron fenced-in graveyard. Laundry stretching from the back stoop to a pole out back. Past the town, there's a motel with cabins, and another little roadside motel, brick, with a sign for color TV and a heated pool.

I wait while he goes in, and he comes out right away, with a real metal key on a plastic turquoise diamond-shaped key ring. It's for the last room on the left. It has one soft king-size bed, a counter with a sink outside the bathroom, and a TV mounted high up on the wall. It is indeed color, but out of register, the reds, blues, and greens all in separate stripes, making the people on the news—which I can't even bear to watch—seem alien and clownish.

I lie down, my body curved into the soft middle of the bed. But I can't sleep. Everything moves, burns up with flames behind my eyes.

I wait until he's sleeping and then I take his phone off the nightstand and sit outside on the curb to smoke a cigarette and call home. I prop the door with a brown fake-leather Gideon Bible, the night air almost as cool as the air conditioning inside the room.

It's near midnight. Couper and I both showered, and ate silently at the barbecue pit in the town we'd passed through. After, we lay on the bed and watched the out-of-whack TV. Neither one of us talking.

Outside, it smells waxy, like opened night flowers. In the trees, the sounds of a whippoorwill, up in the pines.

I think I've been here before. Where the Scamp is parked alongside the yellow brick wall of the building, you can see where the old name of the motel was, in scripted letters from the sixties.
Sunset
.

Alone, with Chuck. The summer that Doe died and Khaki left, and all hell came crawling after us. Me, alone with a man. Me, in a car with a man. In a motel. Running.

I light up his phone and dial my mother's cell.

At first, I don't recognize the voice. Couper, she says, urgent. We are just outside of Delta. Couper?

Who is this? I say.

Oh sweet Lord, it's her, she says, and then I recognize her. June Carol. I hear my mother say, Give me the phone.

But I hang up.

I wonder where we would be by now, naked and roaming the hills. Sleeping in a thicket like animals. Washing in the river. Kentucky. Deep in the Smoky Mountains. Tennessee.

For a long time, after I picked Summer up that morning, when she rocked on all fours, her mouth filled
with foam, choking, drowning from the inside out, after that morning, at the emergency room, the two long blue nights in the hospital, waiting while they put her under, while they tried different antibiotics, different pumps, every time I closed my eyes, I was putting my head back in the sun, and the first thing I saw was her coughing up foam. The hot red behind my eyelids. Her face. Her eyes bloodshot from coughing, her mouth filling so much she could never clear it.

Now, it's Tennessee. Deflated. Everything inside, out the back of her skull, and spattered on the window.

I close my eyes and try to change the image.

I watch a white woman disappearing in a dark field. Her body, perfect. Her hair, like light. Like white fire. A torch, moving through the night.

How in the hell, I ask Couper in the morning, did you manage to get both my mother and June Carol here?

I didn't, he says, dryly. There's no coffeemaker in the room, and before I'd gotten up, Couper had gone down to the motel office, where they keep an old-style Bunn, and a pot ready every morning. He hands me a paper cup, hot to the touch, filled with black coffee.

I called your mother, he says, to let her know, and she said she was coming. I didn't know she was bringing anyone with her. Or that it wouldn't be your father.

He's not my father, I say.

Well, he says. Details.

She's also not my mother, I say.

I tried to ask you that, he says.

How was I supposed to know? I shout. But at the sound of my voice, he goes outside, and starts moving things around inside the Scamp.

I never would have traced the lines back to the same mother. Me and Khaki. Summer. I never would have left my own mother out of it. Carleen. Who was she if not my own?

I thought about riding in her car on the days before I went to school, going to the supermarket with her. Wanting a quarter to ride the horse out front. About sharing a bag of potato chips on the couch. Sitting on the bench seat of an old car, between her and Chuck, flying down the highway. About her face, before it gave in to booze. Her skin. I always thought it was velvet soft. Her cheeks under my fat little-kid hands.

I wanted Summer to hold my face like that.

I thought about the way Teddy would call me over to their kitchen table. In their black-and-red kitchen, the leather bar behind her. A clock that said
Seagrams
and had bubbles moving under the surface.

Come here, she'd say, whispering through the hole in her throat. She'd take my hands and hold out my arms, run her fingers through my hair, whether it was long, or short, after. After Nudie. She'd inspect me. Her eyes narrow. A cigarette on her lips. Let me look at you.

They pull up just after nine in the morning, in June Carol's cream-colored Buick with her Jesus fish on the
back and her guardian angel on the dashboard. If they drove straight from South Lake, I'm guessing my mother hasn't had a cigarette in a good long while, and that she's had just about enough of June Carol. I watch June Carol bump the car against the cement barrier, and lean her head on the steering wheel. The car has barely stopped when my mother gets out of the passenger side.